


Proof of Concept

by shewho



Series: The '98 Campaign [2]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: Break Up, F/M, First Bartlet Campaign, Flashbacks, Josh & Sam's D.C. Adventures, M/M, Missing Scene, Past Relationship(s), Political Campaigns, hotel room confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-11-28 18:17:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20970926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: [August, 1998 – Des Moines, IA]“Lisa and I,” Sam says abruptly one night in Des Moines, apropos of nothing. “We’re done.”Holy shit.





	Proof of Concept

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, Josh and Sam have seen some shit. There's a brief non-graphic discussion of animal death (it's a "House of Cards" pilot easter egg, sooo... yeah, you'll know it when you see it; sorry, guys, but the dog dies in this one), plus a one line mention of injuries resulting from minor past interpersonal violence between J & S because even though they've got three Ivy League degrees between them, they're actual morons. So, y'know, just be aware of that.

August, 1998 – Des Moines, IA

“Lisa and I,” Sam says abruptly one night in Des Moines, apropos of nothing. “We’re done.”

_Holy shit._

The words echo back through the recesses of Josh’s brain, fanning out like dye spreading in water.

_we’re done we’re done we’re done we’re done we’redonewe’redonewe’redone_

Josh rolls over on his side to face Sam, even though the other man is nothing more than a lump of hotel duvet and folded limbs, a Sam-shaped void in the darkness. He doesn’t say _“I’m sorry, man”_ because he isn’t. He doesn’t say _“that sucks”_ because it doesn’t. Finally he settles on, “You know I’m here for you,” because that’s the truth and has been for nearly ten years.

Yes, okay; touché. _“I’m here for you”_ may be totally cliché, but it’s the truth.

“Yeah,” Sam says, and his voice comes out all thick and ropy in a way Josh hasn’t heard since Sam was twenty-six and some congressional aide in a bar was telling them about how his congressman strangled a dog that had been sideswiped outside his brownstone. Sam had looked as horrified as Josh felt when the guy finished his story and then _laughed_, and they’d settled up their tabs pretty quick after that.

Sam only started to cry after he’d chain-smoked three cigarettes on the walk back to Josh’s apartment, but it was the ugly, heaving kind that made it impossible to do anything but sit down on the curb and wait it out.

June, 1991 – Washington, D.C.

> “_Josh_,” Sam says, _sobs_, his whole body shaking with the force of his distress.
> 
> There’s nothing to say, nothing to do except wind an arm around Sam and let his hand trace endless circles across Sam’s spine in an attempt to soothe him. “Hey, c’mon,” Josh says for lack of anything pithier. “I’ve got you.”
> 
> Sam ignores this. His ribs heave underneath the fabric of his shirt.
> 
> Nobody ever teaches you what to do when tales of congressmen wringing dogs’ necks make your best friend cry. There’s no handbook for this.
> 
> He doesn’t know what to say to fix the situation, how to make it better. Nothing can make this better. “Sam, c’mon. Breathe; you’re gonna make yourself sick.” Sam makes a strangled sound at that, something that comes out high and hot and wordless against Josh’s neck. For a moment, Josh wonders if it would be easier, kinder somehow to let Sam wear himself out, just let him breathe like that – all fast and shallow rasping – until he passes out cold on the fucking Georgetown sidewalk.
> 
> His own chest _aches _at the sound.
> 
> Sam doesn’t stop. Instead, he wedges himself further into Josh’s embrace, as if he’d like nothing better than to crawl inside Josh’s chest cavity and take up residence there. The muscles in his back tremble as he presses his face against Josh’s collar and breathes wetly into the heat he finds there.
> 
> There’s a lump forming high in Josh’s throat and a prickly burning sensation behind his sinuses, like he’s about to cry. He doesn’t want to cry. He really doesn’t.
> 
> “Sam, it’s oka–” he starts to say before he’s cut off by a hand planted in his sternum.
> 
> “Don’t,” Sam snarls, the word losing most of its venom when it breaks in the middle. “Everything is not ‘okay’. That was not _okay_. A sitting congressman killed a _dog_ with his own hands, and his aide thought it was a funny anecdote to tell us over a beer!”
> 
> “Hey,” Josh catches Sam by the wrist until he stops fighting, breathing hard, twisted so he’s half-in and half-out of Josh’s lap, bony kneecap digging into the meat of Josh’s thigh. “Hey, it’s _okay_.” He strokes his thumb over the racing pulse in Sam’s wrist and kisses the flushed, sweat-salt-tears skin along Sam’s jaw, doing his best to sound convincing. “Just breathe.”
> 
> Eventually, Sam takes a deep, shuddering breath and stops holding himself like he’s made of broken china.
> 
> “It’s fine,” Josh reassures, pulling back but not pulling away. “You’re fine; we’re all fine.”
> 
> Sam shakes his head, tears standing out in his eyes. Josh is pretty sure that these tears are more frustration than grief. “It _isn’t_.”
> 
> “It’ll _be_ fine.” His voice sounds like he’s got sand lodged in his windpipe. “We aren’t like them,” he adds quietly, barely words at all.
> 
> Sam doesn’t respond right away and in the silence that follows, everything suddenly seems very real and very serious, the words hanging in the air between them, almost resonant above the sounds of passing traffic. Finally Sam nods; a consensus. His head lolls slightly, but his grip on Josh’s hand tightens until their interlaced fingers stand out bright white and bloodless everywhere they touch.
> 
> “It’ll be fine,” Josh repeats, sharper this time, cupping Sam’s cheek with his free hand and tilting it so Sam’s forced to meet his eyes. “I promise.”
> 
> It’s going be fine, even if Josh has to physically beat some decency into the representative from South Carolina to make it so.

August, 1998 – Des Moines, IA

Josh never did go back to that bar, even after the congressman from the SC 5th lost his seat in the House and Sam moved to New York. He’s pretty sure it’s a froyo parlor now.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothin’.” The air conditioner clicks on in the silence, a quiet hum of fans and ductwork rattling to life. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. ‘M alright.” Sam shifts unseen in his crumpled nest of stiff white sheets. “It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming. It feels sort of sudden and surprising, but really it’s neither of those things.”

Josh waits, quiet. He’s known Sam a long time; he knows what it sounds like when Sam’s gearing up for a ramble. _Just get it out_, he thinks. _You’ll feel better. Get it all out._

“It’s just…” Sam laughs, but it’s cheerless. “We’ve been arguing for months about the stupidest things. Who didn’t renew the parking permits on time with the co-op association. Who bought another jar of thyme even though we already have three. Whose toothpaste residue is still crusted on the side of the bathroom sink.”

This isn’t new information, not to Josh or probably anyone who has shared a common wall with Sam’s various hotel rooms in the past four months. Those walls are indecently thin. More than once he’s come back from dinner to hear half of an argument being conducted over the phone, Sam and Lisa fighting to the verbal death over miles and miles of telephone wires.

“We weren’t even having the fight we both wanted to have,” Sam continues. His voice is surprisingly level considering how obviously upset he is. “But we’ve had it now. I don’t know. It was bizarre; it wasn’t like any fight we’ve ever had before. Those were all fighting hard and making up soft. This was different. This was like we’d each secretly been making a list of every hurtful thing that had gone unsaid in the past three years, and then decided to say them all in one night.”

That’s a shockingly self-aware assessment coming from Sam, the bit about fighting hard and making up soft.

Actually, it’s so fucking familiar that it’s a little alarming. Josh remembers what is was like to fight with Sam, how they’d talk over and around the problem _ad nauseum_, studiously ignoring it until it erupted between them. Arguments like that could start out as civilized debates and culminate in shouting matches that would leave them both fuming, with tempers flaring hot and nothing resolved and absolutely no intentions of apologizing.

Josh has always been phenomenally bad at saying he’s sorry, practically since he can remember. It’s something he inherited from his father. The Lyman men are, as a general rule, genetically incapable of rendering any sort of genuine verbal apology.

Even when he was a kid, the distinction between meaning you’re sorry and saying you’re sorry wasn’t lost on Josh. At some point he learned that simply saying _“I’m sorry”_ would work almost every time, even when he meant _“I’m sorry that you’re upset; move on”_ and not _“I’m sorry that this happened”._ Still, it’s like he missed a seminar somewhere along the way, some basic How-To course. Remedial education for non-apologists.

In Josh’s mind, a bogus apology is on par with gargling drain cleaner: it leaves a bad taste in his mouth and might actually kill him.

That said, whenever they fought – whether it was just with words, or their one and only painfully-sober clothes-ripping fistfight which left Josh with an ugly bruise spanning his cheekbone and Sam nursing a cut lip and a bloody nose and a horrible raw scrape down his spine where Josh had shoved him too-hard against a doorjamb – Sam was usually the one to reach out with an olive branch of coffee from Beanhive, or a two-A.M. email inviting Josh to go running at six. 

“It’s not even that we outgrew each other, or grew apart,” Sam says, jolting Josh back into their bland hotel room. “It’s like we realized at the same time that we’ve been in survival-mode for the past year. And there’s so many excuses – between litigation and publication deadlines and planning the wedding, and then the campaign on top of all of that – but none of that is what’s actually undone us.” Sam cracks his knuckles, impossibly loud in the dark.

_“It’s called crepitus,”_ he’d said a million years ago, the first time Josh had pointed out the habit.

It’s a tell, a stall tactic, a sure sign that’s Sam’s grown uncomfortable with the topic and is searching for an exit.

_“It’s disgusting,”_ Josh had retorted, as if that was going to make a difference in Sam’s awful, arthritis-inducing habits.

“It started to feel like,” Sam hesitates, groping for a metaphor. “You know when you’ve been roommates with the same person for a long time and even though they annoy you, you figure it’s probably easier to stay with them than to break in a new roommate? Especially since you’ve already got one who knows all your weird habits and your allergies and your favorite Thai restaurant and everything?”

He isn’t sure if Sam actually expects an answer, or if the questions are rhetorical.

Five years ago, Sam’s favorite place for Thai food was Bua Thai in Dupont Circle, and every formulation of Dawn dish soap would make the backs of his hands break out in horrible red rashes.

“Sure,” Josh says. It’s not a lie.

“It was like that. Because that – us, Lisa and I – that worked for a long time, but lately it got to a place that was incompatible. _Un-fucking-bearable._ Neither one of us wanted to give up ground, and it wasn’t fair to either of us to keep going through the motions like that. For the last eight, maybe ten months, we’ve just been doing the same performative gestures to try and fake it until we could made it. But we can’t. Not really.”

People used to say that Sam and Lisa were well-matched. By the time they met, both of them had developed the same disturbing gift, this uncanny and freakish ability to slice directly into the heart of a matter, neither one willing to mince words in order to avoid a wound. A pair of deft lexical duelists, they obsessed over the precision of language and used it as their choicest weapon, every word pinpoint-precise upon leaving their fingers and tongues.

The two of them worked well together for so long because they always knew just what to say to each other. How to stroke the other’s ego without it seeming disingenuous, how to slyly slip an opposing opinion into otherwise-innocuous dinner conversation. Every conversation between those two was happening on at least two simultaneous levels, half the time in their own private vernacular.

And then Sam and Lisa didn’t work so well anymore because they took out all the bladed language safely tucked away in a homemade butcherblock of civility and sentiment, every sharp word unspoken between them in the entire time they’d been together, and lobbed them at each other with daunting accuracy until they’d severed all the ties between them.

“I dunno,” Sam says. “We loved each other as best we could, but we loved each other… badly.”

The past tense jars Josh. _Loved_.

“It’s probably for the best. You can’t stay with someone just because it’s _comfortable_. Comfortable is for couches, and ratty sweatpants. It’s not for people.” Sam sighs, and the words are still slightly raw when he adds, “She deserves better.”

_“She isn’t going to find someone better,”_ Josh doesn’t say.

“Campaigns are rough,” he says instead. “Not everybody’s cut out for this kind of thing.”

A few long minutes pass, and he lies there in the dark listening to Sam’s breathing as it level outs, deep and slow on the cusp of sleep. Then – “Sam?”

It takes a second for Sam to respond, and his voice comes back sluggish and slack when he finally does. “Yeah?”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Promise.”

“Okay.”

(Sometimes it’s best to leave the past where it lies. Josh has never been particularly adept at that. He doesn’t know when to leave sleeping dogs lie. He’d much rather prod them and inspect the contents of their jaws, consequences be damned.)


End file.
